Essay for (Safe
Inside My) Green Zone

By Kim Beil

As published in the brochure for the exhibition
"(Safe Inside My) Green Zone" at CAF

“When the swords ran every
which way like red-stained snakes, our fathers warmed to life;
the sun of all peace seemed limp and lackluster to them, but the
long peace caused them shame. How they sighed, our fathers, when
they saw the gleaming bright, dried up swords on the wall! Like
them, they thirsted for war. For a sword wants to drink blood and
sparkles with desire.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

When
opponents of video games praise the creativity fostered by unstructured
play, they rarely draw on children’s war games as examples. Instead,
arguments typically range from righteous indignation over the psychological
detriments of first-person shooter games to nostalgic pining for play
centered in the out of doors. But what of the old Roy Rogers and Butch
Cassidy-fueled “cowboys and Indians”? Or cops and robbers?
Arguably to involve oneself physically, not virtually, even in imaginary
battle implicates not only the subject’s psychology, but also the
very physiology of the body as the fight or flight response is engaged.

James Van
Arsdale’s installation, (Safe Inside My) Green Zone draws on
the iconography of Cold War era board games to examine not the legitimacy of
play in its many forms—from the virtual to various instantiations of
the real—but the object of its representation: the relations of human
society. Staged on bare, wooden platforms with intricate under-girding that
reveals the complex engineering of a bridge are multitudes of colorful, cast-plastic
figurines. Glossy cherry-red bunkers and sour apple-green trees have the alluring
sheen and translucency of hard candy. Pop art inspired explosions are mounted
onto wooden props, matte green gas cloud swirls decorate the walls, and movement
of troops and tanks is indicated by green plastic arrows that form arching
paths between the bunkers and trees.

The all-seeing
vantage point created by the low platforms evokes in the adult viewer a sense
of detachment and an illusion of control. Scholar of philosophy and rhetoric,
Judith Butler argues that a similar distance is employed by the mainstream
news media to represent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a 2003 interview
she elaborated,
“You’re never going to see the bomb drop from beneath, only from
above. And you’re never going to see any portraits of human beings as
they run, or as they cower, when the bombs are dropped. And you’ll never
see the decimated bodies. You’ll never see the close-up. The mainstream
media won’t show this. It’s the panoramic aesthetic that allows
for this nefarious sublimity, where you get ‘shock and awe’ which
is only possible from a distance.”

The panoramic aesthetic of Van Arsdale’s work depends on an adult
audience who is distanced not only by time from the childhood act of
play but also by physical proximity to the artwork. Nostalgia can bridge
this gap; the familiarity of the symbols in Van Arsdale’s installation
invite the adult viewer to immerse himself in memory of childhood game
play, to picture himself first at eye level with the platforms, then
in the active practice of play. The absence of human figures in (Safe
Inside My) Green Zone marks an empty space for the viewer to inhabit.
As Butler describes, this strategy, when mainstream media outlets employ
it, imposes distance between the observer and the object of his attention.
However, the mode of interaction with Van Arsdale’s installation
is left largely left up to the viewer. While it certainly takes a powerful
act of imagination to project oneself into the arena of action, whether
on the game board or the television screen, it takes little more than
a bending of the knees for a viewer to change his physical perspective
on Van Arsdale’s installation. This movement from the distance
of a cinematic crane shot to the closeness of eye level returns to the
viewer an experience of immediacy characteristic of the physical realm
of childhood.

Such duality
in the experience of the adult viewer is also exploited by the paradoxical
nature of Van Arsdale’s Exploding Sandbags and Grenade Popsicles.
The green zone, maintained by heavy firepower and unrecognized by international
rules of engagement, is meant to be a site of safety. However, as is seen with
increasing frequency, this demarcation provides little more than the illusion
of safety for those located inside its imaginary borders. Here sandbags designed
to protect against explosions are themselves agents of destruction. Popsicles,
those brightly colored markers of sweetness and childhood, are deadly.

The adult
viewer is guided in his experience of (Safe Inside My) Green Zone through
identification with both the memories of childhood and a sense of responsibility
that comes with adulthood and parenthood. Highlighting this experience of the
adult caretaker, the installation also speaks to the desire to protect the
child for whom the war game was created, akin to the experience of watching
with shock and horror as grade-schoolers suck on candy cigarettes. As the arrangement
of (Safe Inside My) Green Zone suggests an absent subject—a
child who just stopped playing with the toys—viewers are driven to picture
the toys with their stenciled insignias of fiery explosions in the hands of
that imagined child.

Through
his careful selection of materials and attention to the details of marketing
and commodification, Van Arsdale creates a uniquely rich environment that calls
attention to the multiple subjectivities of his viewers. Van Arsdale’s
installation, like the psychoanalytic practice of play therapy invented by
Freud’s student Melanie Klein, allows viewers to interact with his game
on several levels. His canny use of child-sized props on low tables instills
in his viewers a mise-en-abyme of identification. From the initial
viewing moment that is characterized by distance, to a gradual recognition
of a latent childhood subjectivity hidden in the self, and finally a reestablishment
of the distance implied by the move to protect the imagined child, (Safe
Inside My) Green Zone illuminates the tensions inherent to identification
with an imagined other. As opposed to Butler’s description of
the “panoramic aesthetic,” demonstrated by media accounts of recent
conflicts, Van Arsdale’s installation invites the viewer to imagine himself
on the ground in the midst of the action. As Nietzsche writes, “If one
wants a friend, then must one also want to wage war for him: and in order to
wage war, one must beable to be an enemy.” Likewise
Van Arsdale reminds his viewers that the human subject can never be one and
not the other. The subject is always friend and foe, adult and child, attacker
and attacked.